Murdoch on Owning The Wall Street Journal

Im sometimes frustrated by the long stories, Rupert Murdoch says.Credit
James Estrin/The New York Times

Like any close reader of The Wall Street Journal, Rupert Murdoch has his opinions.

“I’m sometimes frustrated by the long stories,” he said, adding that he rarely gets around to finishing some articles.

The editorial pages? He likes them but would like to see more political coverage in the news pages. “I might put more emphasis on Washington,” he said. He’s not a huge fan of the Saturday Journal begun in 2005, but he would continue it and look at converting its Pursuits section into a glossy weekend magazine to compete with The New York Times Sunday Magazine.

And while he’s no technology geek, he also said he regularly reads the paper’s technology columnist, Walter Mossberg, although he added: “I don’t say I understand it perfectly.”

Most readers just write a letter to the editor. Mr. Murdoch offered $5 billion to buy The Journal’s parent company, Dow Jones & Company. To do that, he must first win over the Bancroft family, which has controlled Dow Jones for the last 92 years and has so far resisted all of his overtures, in part over concerns of what he might do to The Journal.

He insists he won’t meddle in the journalism or slash-and-burn the staff. “We’re not coming in with a bunch of cost-cutters,” he said, but added: “I’m not saying it’s going to be a holiday camp for everybody.”

In an interview in his eighth-floor office in Midtown Manhattan yesterday, Mr. Murdoch, who occasionally glanced at his notes on a yellow tablet, waxed on about his plans to invest in the company’s journalism, including rebranding the forthcoming Fox business channel with The Journal’s name. He also spoke of his family’s commitment to preserving the paper’s heritage and, perhaps more surprisingly, with sympathy about the position his offer has put the Bancroft family in.

The family, which owns 64 percent of the voting shares, has said that 52 percent of those voting shares oppose Mr. Murdoch’s offer. They have not answered any of his invitations to meet with him and his sons, James and Lachlan, and a daughter, Elisabeth.

“My real intention is to try to get a meeting, not to impress them with my charm — if I have any — but to impress them with the intentions and feelings of my adult children,” Mr. Murdoch said, trying to assuage concerns about succession at the News Corporation as he leaned back on his taupe sofa.

While he said he still hopes to address the family as a group, Mr. Murdoch said he did not personally plan to start to lobby any individual shareholders on the fence. The Bancroft trusts, representing three dozen or so members of the family, own 24.7 percent of Dow Jones’s stock but control 64.2 percent of the votes through supervoting shares. With many other shareholders in favor of his bid, Mr. Murdoch might only have to persuade a handful of family members.

“I don’t want to be in a position of putting one Bancroft against another Bancroft. I’m not in the business of stirring up trouble in the family,” he said. “Our understanding is that there are several members of the family who have not made a final decision,” he said. “I think the next step for us is to be patient — and to be available at anytime should they respond to my suggestion for a meeting.”

And if a large majority of the family ended up clearly rejecting his bid? “It would be ugly — depending on your perspective, it might be admirable too,” Mr. Murdoch said of the way the family would most likely be perceived. “I think it would cause quite a lot of argument.”

Mr. Murdoch has long sought The Wall Street Journal. He said he decided to finally make a formal bid after years of flirting with the company. His offer — worth $60 a share, a 67 percent premium — was meant “to get the attention of the owners,” he said, while acknowledging that even some his own board members who unanimously supported the proposal shared the view that it was “insanely high.”

Mr. Murdoch needs to win over not only the Bancroft family but members of The Journal’s newsroom, many of whom hope to fend off his bid. Jesse Drucker, a Wall Street Journal reporter and representative of the paper’s union, has written an e-mail message to his colleagues, asking them to write short letters to three members of the Bancroft family: Leslie Hill, Christopher Bancroft and Elizabeth Steele.

“I am urging you to take part in this,” he wrote. “The Bancrofts are under tremendous pressure to accept News Corp.’s offer, and that pressure will only become greater in the likely event that Murdoch raises his bid.”

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Mr. Murdoch spoke of his upbringing in newspapers and listed various titles in Australia and Britain that he says he saved from disappearing by revitalizing them. He added that he had started businesses around the world — including the Fox Broadcasting network and Fox News Channel in the United States — where people said the market was too crowded, and prided himself on expanding media choices.

“It has been a long career and I’m not going to say that it hasn’t been punctuated by mistakes,” he said.

Mr. Murdoch said that if it were legally possible, he would rechristen his planned Fox Business Channel with a name with “Journal” in it.

While Mr. Murdoch went to great pains to explain that he sees himself as a lifelong newspaperman who learned journalism from his father in Australia, he also tried to say that his reputation as an interloper owner was overstated. He said he was not involved with the news operations of the higher-end newspapers, although he takes a closer role in tabloids like The Sun in London and The New York Post.

And he said he would propose to the Bancrofts setting up a separate board for the newspaper, mandated with ensuring its editorial independence, as he has done since he acquired The Times and Sunday Times in 1981.

He said the independent board works, recalling that “The Sunday Times came out loudly for the decapitation of Margaret Thatcher,” whom he had personally supported. He said, “I didn’t know about it,” and then joked, “I pretended I hadn’t read it.”

Many people have said that The Times has become more populist or down-market under his ownership, but Mr. Murdoch said “absolutely not” to that characterization, adding that he had doubled editorial space and expanded foreign bureaus.

And while he said he wouldn’t take a hands-on approach, he said, “I think I’d be around the place — not every day. After all, it’s going to be News Corporation money and I’d be grossly negligent if I didn’t take a close interest.”

He said that he admired the Dow Jones chief executive, Richard F. Zannino, and the newly appointed top editor, Marcus W. Brauchli, and would leave them in place. He said that he did not plan on bringing any News Corporation editors to the paper, but that he did plan to call on Robert Thomson, the editor of his Times of London and the former editor of the United States edition of The Financial Times, for advice.

Although he said that he hoped to make money off his $5 billion investment, Mr. Murdoch said, as he did in his letter to the family, that being part of his larger global company would allow the company to invest for the longer term.

He talked about revitalizing The Journal’s editions in Europe and Asia, which have been depleted of resources. He also suggested that globalization would make The Journal even more important internationally — he said millions of people in India and China represented a huge opportunity, not to be squandered.

Mr. Murdoch said recent changes by management like scaling back international editions were made for “efficiency” and that his company would “be coming from a different point of view to develop a paper that provides management and journalists more resources and more investment.”

“A year ago they made $81 million after tax and paid $80 million in dividends,” he said, “and you can’t grow a company that way.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: If Rupert Murdoch Owned The Wall Street Journal ... Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe